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Concept
FLAC
Summary
FLAC (flæk; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.
FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking.
Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bitstream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001.
On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph.org banner. Xiph.org is home to other free compression formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex and Opus.
Version 1.3.0 was released on 26 May 2013, at which point development was moved to the Xiph.org git repository.
In 2019, FLAC was proposed as an IETF standard.
FLAC is a lossless encoding of linear pulse-code modulation data.
A FLAC file consists of the fLaC, metadata, and encoded audio.
The encoded audio is divided into frames, which consists of a header, a data block, and a CRC16 checksum. Each frame is encoded independent of each other. A frame header begins with a sync word, used to identify the beginning of a valid frame. The rest of the header contains the number of samples, position of the frame, channel assignment, and optionally the sample rate and bit depth. The data block contains the audio information.
Metadata in FLAC precedes the audio. Properties like the sample rate and the number of channels are always contained in the metadata. It may also contain other information, the album cover for example.
Official source
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